Oklahoma Asks, and Answers, a Sucky State Question

Voters are fairly stupid—I think that’s been established. Maybe individually they know what they’re doing: They own landscaping companies and know where the good pizza places are and read the paper and do the Sudoku every day, even on Friday when it gets really hard. But something happens when they get to the voting booth, with those old-fashioned curtains and the ballot that seems more complicated than it needs to be. They freeze up. Who are these judges on the ballot? What’s the “anti-prohibition” party? What the fuck are all these measures I’ve never heard of? Panic sets in. Some circles are filled in, there’s a momentary anxiety that they filled in the circles wrong, the voter realizes they might have voted for the wrong judge, but it’s too late to fix it now. Then they get outside and they’re smart again.

That’s the only explanation I can think of for the passing of Oklahoma’s State Question 755, which amends the state constitution to ban judges from considering “international or Sharia law” when making rulings. Because damn, that is a stupid amendment. It wasn’t as if a bunch of judges were commanding hands to be chopped off and whores to be stoned. I’ve never been to Oklahoma, but I’m pretty sure that Islamic law is about to be instituted there. And the UN isn’t about to take control of the state either.

I’m sure the voters saw that measure on the ballot and said, “Well, better safe than sorry. I really don’t want to see strict Sharia law imposed on me, although it would give me an excuse to grow out my beard.” That’s like amending the constitution to say, “If aliens ever attack Earth, like in Independence Day or that new movie that looks almost exactly like Independence Day, we are totally going to fight back, like Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith.” A fine sentiment, but not something that needs to be in a constitution.

The problem is the anti-Sharia amendment could create difficulties due to vague wording and the general craziness of it. Indian tribes say they’re worried that Question 755 might invalidate their tribal laws, and international law is actually kind of important when resolving disputes between companies in Oklahoma and their overseas business partners. (Who knew international law governed international trade?)

Question 755 will probably get challenged in the courts and likely overturned (it might violate the ever-pesky First Amendment by singling out Sharia). So it’s likely just another example of xenophobic paranoia from the heartland that sounds good on paper but in reality is not a good idea, or even an idea at all, much like the Republican proposal to save money by cutting nonexistent social programs isn’t an idea. It’s fun, and sort of funny, to yell and make laws about problems that do technically not exist, but maybe we have better things to do. Do we? Read more!

The Most Worthless Thing On The Internet, Dying Magazine Edition

Today’s most worthless thing on the internet has crossover appeal: not only is it a web page not worth visiting, it might be the least essential piece of political journalism ever published. It comes courtesy of Time magazine, which apparently decided that this obscure new political movement called the “Tea Party” deserves more media attention than it’s getting.

Back when it was one of the few available sources of national and international news, Time used to be an iconic publication—it used to matter who was on the cover. This latest cover had the image of an elephant in a tea cup (get it? Metaphors! Visual shorthand!) and the astonishingly uninteresting headline, “It’s Tea Party Time.” Now, if Time was your sole source of political news, if it dominated the market the way it used to, this might be an interesting cover. “This is intriguing,” you might say. “Tea Party? And they’re taking over the Republican Party? I must read on!”

But, obviously, no one in the world relies on Time this way. Anyone who has paid the slightest bit of attention to the news, even someone who gets all her news from The Daily Show, already knows more about the Tea Party than the Time article manages to communicate. On this subject, Time is hopelessly trailing hundreds of blogs and other print publications, but instead of trying to find a new angle on the Tea Party it rehashes events that have been covered already and spreads on a layer of vague generalities.

Among the things the article does not bother to discuss in detail are:

• -The fractured nature of the Tea Party. There are actually many, many groups that compose the “movement,” and there are important ideological differences between them. Some are more free-market libertarian, some are conservative Christians; Rand Paul and Christine O’Donnell do not have the same agenda.


• -The money trail that leads from some “grassroots” organizations to the billionaire Koch brothers, which the New Yorker covered already. In fact, the Koches are not even mentioned in the Time piece.


• -Glenn Beck is mentioned, but only in passing, and is lumped in with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity—which is odd because he’s widely regarded as the face of the Tea Party and just held that massive rally in Washington D.C.


• -Most notably, the Time article only focuses on the recent crop of primaries and doesn’t acknowledge the two Tea Party candidates who have actually run against Democrats—Scott Brown, who won a Senate seat in Massachusetts at least partially because of his opponent’s incompetence, and Doug Hoffman in New York’s 23rd district, who lost his race thanks to Republican in-fighting.

Besides all of those omissions, which make the article instantly outdated, there’s also the problem that Time is a weekly, which meant it could keep up with the news cycle in 1923, when it was founded, but in 2010 it has no chance. Case in point: the Tea Party piece focuses a lot of attention on Christine O’Donnell, the Republican candidate for Senate in Delaware, and even compares her to the “leader of a rebel army.” But less than a week later she’s mostly known for admitting to practicing witchcraft, speaking out against masturbation, talking about feminism in J.R.R. Tolkein, and having a shady financial past. Not coincidentally, she’s trailing by 15 points in a recent Fox News (!) poll, which is not where the leader of a rebel army wants to be. None of that is mentioned in the article, although some of those developments came to light after the article was published. (Sort of argues for the irrelevance of print media, doesn’t it?)

To recap: Time published an article about a phenomenon that was already old news, revealed nothing new about the phenomenon, contributed nothing to the conversation about the phenomenon, and may have overstated the importance of one part (O’Donnell) of that phenomenon. The best you can say about that article is that it doesn’t seem to be factually incorrect. Actually, the best thing that can be said about the article is that it reassures all of those people who don’t read Time that they’re doing the right thing. Read more!

Why Can't We Have a Robot Senate?

As election time approaches and the political junkies work themselves up into a state of almost sexual anticipation, the question everyone is asking is, will there be a bunch of new mostly wealthy, mostly white people in the Senate? Will these people succeed in the Republican party's mission to have the government to almost nothing? If Democrats can barely pass legislation with a nearly 60-40 majority, how in god's name is anything going to be accomplished if the Senate is split roughly 50-50?

If you read George Packer's New Yorker article published over a month ago, you'd know that barely anything gets accomplished in the Senate now. Senators spend a couple days a week in Washington and spend the rest of the time flying back and forth from their home states, where they fundraise, pretend to listen to constituent concerns, and occasionally fuck people they aren't married to. The groundswell of populist rage--I have no idea what that phrase means, incidentally--isn't just directed at Democrats, it's directed at Congress in general. People think that elected officials are doing a shit job, and it's hard to argue against that.

To be fair, criticism of Congress comes from both ends of the political spectrum. Right-wingers think the government is trying to take over every facet of their lives, while left-wingers think the government isn't doing enough. But everyone agrees that the people in Washington are clowns at best, and evil, homicidal clowns at worst.

The solution? Replace them all with robots.


I know you can't replace everyone with robots. The House should remain dominated by humans, at least until machines acquire the ability to feel pain and love, but the Senate would be much more efficient, and probably better supported by the populace, if they were robots. The advantages are obvious: no sex scandals, no embarrassing PR gaffs (unlike the late Ted Stevens, the robots would know the internet is not a series of tubes), and they would never make vicious attack ads. Best of all, there would be no filibustering.

In fact, if robots were the only Senators, there would be no campaigning at all. Here's how an election would work:

1. Instead of voting on candidates, voters would go into the booth and decide how they feel about a number of issues. Are you pro-gay but anti-abortion? Do you want your children to pray in school but also support cap and trade? Just check those boxes, and leave a box blank if you don't know what it's talking about--or in the great American democratic tradition, you can let your opinion be known about issues you are totally uninformed about.

2. The Senate robot for your state would be reprogrammed after the election so its views would match those of its constituents, and it would vote accordingly. If you wanted to, you could also introduce a home-state bias so the robots would try to get military bases and corporate headquarters to move to their states, just like the fallible fleshy senators do. Or leave all of that back room politicking to the humans in the House and have the Senate be a realm of pure issues.

3. That's it. The only problem with this system is that if 51 percent of people in 51 percent of the states believe something absurd and dangerous, like "We should go to war with Iran right now," the robot Senate might try to make that happen. So maybe we institute a rule that 55 Senators have to agree on something in order for it to pass. It would still allow more pieces of legislation to be passed more efficiently than the current arrangement, where you apparently need 60 out of 100 Senators to agree on something for it to become law.

The advantages are too numerous to list here, but some benefits of a robot Senate would be an extremely short legislative session (they could decide on every bill in about a minute), and best of all, people wouldn't elect candidates without knowing their positions first. In the current situation, voters elect one party to Congress because they hate the other party and are shocked and dismayed when the new party in power attempts to enact the policies it said it was going to attempt to enact. (I'm talking about the Democrats and their health care policies, in case that wasn't clear.)

What would be the downside to having a robot Senate? Can anyone think of one? Keep in mind that the House would still be human, so legislation and the amendment process would go on as usual, just not as much in the Senate. I guess the robots could suddenly acquire intelligence and force all humans into death camps, but that probably wouldn't happen. Almost definitely not. Read more!

400 Pages of Suck: A Running Diary of Glenn Beck's Novel, Which I Actually Read

Like a car accident, Glenn Beck fascinates me. He’s one of those rare political figures that doesn’t seem to want to be elected (not that he ever could be), doesn’t seem to want to debate policy in any sort of intellectual, wonkish sense, doesn’t care about building a viable movement (the Tea Party is nothing if not unviable), and doesn’t dream of being a lobbyist or a cabinet member or a diplomat (so far as I know). He’s a pure orator—or demagogue, if you don’t agree with him. He is to television what Rush Limbaugh, or further back, Father Coughlin, was to radio: someone who can manipulate the medium without special effects of any kind, and whose appeal is obscure to anyone who doesn’t share his politics. His style of argument is to basically never state any facts or opinions—he hints at dark, leftist conspiracies, he makes vague references to the Nazis, and, famously, he cries on camera. He’s either stark raving mad, the prototype of the next generation of pundit, or most likely, both. So when I heard he had written a novel (or at least overseen the production of a novel) I had to read it. It took me four and a half hours, and here’s how it went:

6:00 PM, Page 20: After a prologue in which a guy named “Eli Churchill” hints at a giant conspiracy involving Donald Rumsfeld, 11 nuclear weapons, and 2.3 trillion “missing” dollars, then gets shot in the head by a mysterious assassin, this is the first sentence of Chapter One: "Most people think about age and experience in terms of years, but it’s really only moments that define us." Deep, man. We are introduced to Noah Gardner, who has “all the credentials for a killer eHarmony profile” and gets laid constantly, as long as he keeps “the bar for an evening’s companionship at only medium-high.” However, "Noah had begun to realize something about that medium high bar: it takes two to tango.” From context, I known this is supposed to mean that he’s ready for a serious relationship, but I keep staring at that line and I’m pretty sure it’s a mixed metaphor, if you even want to count it as a metaphor.

6:09 PM, Page 25: Only a few sentences after we’re informed Noah is looking for a serious relationship, his vaguely described soulmate appears! She has an “aloof and effortless hotness,” and defies “a traditional chick-at-a-glance inventory.” It’s like the words are forming a picture in my mind!

6:14 PM, Page 30: Noah’s soulmate turns out to be a member of the “Founder’s Keepers,” which sounds a lot like the Tea Party. She doesn’t fall for what we’re told is Noah’s charm, and then tells him a punny joke about the Biblical Noah, who has “herd” everything. Ha ha! For some reason, this witty banter renders our Noah speechless. Anyway, he’s going to meet her at a Founder’s Keepers/Tea Party meeting later.

6:22, Page 38: We meet Noah’s father, who doesn’t believe in God or the dollar. I’m guessing he’ll be a bad guy. Also, he’s in advertising. He talks in phrases like, "I’ll show you the path to a whole new world in which everything you want is laid out before you, ripe for the bountiful harvest.”

6:29, Page 45: Big Bad Dad notes that Social Security “was the boldest Ponzi scheme in history” and forecasts worldwide economic devastation. It’s sort of like what’s happened in real life in the past few years, but a lot simpler. Oh, and it turns out this guy is the guy who came up with the idea of selling bottled water. He’s definitely evil. He speaks vaguely of an evil-sounding conspiracy.

6:38: Page 56: Chapter 4 consisted entirely of Noah calling some high-ranking financial people’s assistants at the request of his father. Remember, this is a “thriller.”

6:43, Page 61: The ad agency the Gardners work at is responsible for every successful ad campaign of the past 50 years, from selling t-shirts of Che and Mao to “clueless rock stars” to selling the lottery to the guileless public to helping every president get elected, except for Jimmy Carter and Nixon, who was too cheap. (That’s an odd admission, since Nixon’s campaign was one of the greatest accomplishments in advertising history, but whatever.)

7:00, Page 87: The Tea Party meeting in this book is “…a total cross section, a mix of everyone—three-piece suits rubbing elbows with T-shirts and sweat pants, yuppies chatting with hippies, black and white, young and old, a cowboy hat here, a six-hundred-dollar haircut there.” So clearly, we’re in an alternate reality. Also, I come across this gem of a line, as Molly gazes at Noah: "It must have been only a second or two, but it felt so much longer than any other mere moment he could remember."

7:03, Page 89: Despite the open nature of this gathering of patriots, the characters that we’ve met so far have Southern or Appalachian accents. Are there any gay people at this gathering, I wonder?

7:07, Page 96: Noah is a “human lie detector” and picks out an “infiltrator” at the meeting (which is packed, by the way). I thought this was an open, accepting crowd. Chapter 10 looks like it’s going to be straight exposition, delivered through the mouth of a speaker at the meeting.

7:15, Page 110: Yup, the speaker told us all about how bad corruption, the New Deal, lobbyists, and the IRS were. The crowd was rapt with attention at a boilerplate speech that included advice like, “Instead of bin Laden, give them Gandhi” and the somewhat vague rhetorical question, "Who loves America more, those who want to restore it, or those who want to transform it?”

7:23, Page 120: More speeches. The government has a secret plot to round up all the right-wingers and third-party members into camps. There’s a muddle of left- and right-wing issues, then Noah is goaded into getting in front of everyone, where he quotes George Carlin and The Beatles. These chapters are an accurate description of most meetings of fringe political groups (except for the packed house); they really are very boring.

7:29, Page 129: The meeting is predictably broken up by black-clad cops. This is less boring than the speeches because anything would be, but it’s delivered in workmanlike prose: "As the black truncheon swung down Noah reached up and caught the uniformed man by the wrist, stopping him cold with an unexpectedly steely grip toned over years with his personal trainer at the Madison Square Club.” Good of them to mention where Noah works out. I’m sure that’s important.

7:42, Page 138: Noah is under arrest. The cops are boring and generic. This is how a lawyer is described: "he always looked as though he’d just stepped out of the ‘Awesome Lawyers’ issue of Gentlemen’s Quarterly."

7:48, Page 152: They get out of jail in a few pages, although I couldn’t tell you exactly what happened. Some cops admitted infiltrating the meeting and causing trouble, I think. That’s glossed over though, so we can get to the part where Molly apologizes to Noah for misjudging him. I’m bored. Can we get a sex scene?

7:52, Page 158: No. More speeches. Noah spouts off on the hideous history of Public Relations. He sounds like the young liberal journalism teacher I had in high school, but more boring.

7:55, Page 170: Eliot Spitzer makes a cameo. Noah has a fancy apartment. He reads a books before going to bed, but realizes "No arrangement of ink on a page could possibly hold a candle to the twists his actual day had taken." Good of Beck to tell us how awesome that preceding sequence was.

8:01, Page 180: A character clearly modeled after Beck himself (a celebrity who has a shady, drug-ridden past, and is now a YouTube sensation) is approached by an FBI agent. This is supposed to be a “thriller,” but except for the brief appearance of the riot squad, every single scene in 180 pages has been people talking.

8:07, Page 187: Looks like the Beck character is going to be used as an informant to trick violent right-wing militia members. We’re told he’s “charming” and there’s “quite a bit more to this young fellow than initially met the eye.” Let’s hope so.

8:11, Page 196: The two soulmates kiss! "With everything to see and hear around them there at the very crossroads of the world, soaring billboards, scrolling news crawlers, bright digital Jumbotrons that lined the tall buildings and blotted out the whole evening sky, it all disappeared to its rightful insignificance, flat as a postcard." Sentences like that make me long for the ham-fisted speeches.

8:18, Page 215: Well, I got my wish. Noah and Molly discover the conspiracy that was obviously going on. The secret conspiracy includes taking away gun rights and giving convicts the right to vote. Weren’t the good guys ranting about the prison system some pages ago? The concept of the “Overton Window” is explained: people don’t accept radical change all at once. Talk about self-evident truths.

8:24, Page 233: We visit the home of one of the radicals. In a bit of business stolen directly from Fahrenheit 451, the Founders’ Keepers memorize books written by the founders.

8:46, Page 264: This is an example how events are related in the book: the FBI agent goes undercover and meets some violent militia folks, the scene is described in detail, and then we flash forward in the next chapter and are told about the most interesting parts of the meeting (the militia folks might be suspicious, there’s an extra militia member who wasn’t present) only after the fact. Why can’t we have a complete scene? Would that be too exciting?

9:00, Page 293: It’s becoming obvious that the conspiracy is engineering a fake terrorist attack by a right-wing militia to allow them to put all the Tea Partiers in concentration camps. Noah’s Big Bad Dad is giving a sub-1984 speech to explain why he needs to take over the world. Seriously, that’s his plan: world domination.

9:04, Page 301: We’re now in Part Three. I didn’t notice when we crossed from Part One to Part Two. Noah throws up because his father is so evil, and Noah’s "skin was as pale as a Newark Bay oyster.” That’s my favorite line so far.

9:09, Page 313: We meet a woman who was never mentioned before, but is apparently Noah’s best friend. Luckily for the plot, she’s a doctor who informs him one of the good-guy revolutionaries was poisoned, and hints at a conspiracy. Every character is constantly hinting at a conspiracy, even if he’s just feeding his cat.

9:15, Page 327: Holy shit! Beck and his co-authors clearly realized that things were getting boring, so this happens: Molly pretends to be Natalie Portman so the protagonists can sneak through airport security, but the security guard is a Star Wars geek (Noah knows this from his “Luke Skywalker blow-cut”). Being a Star Wars geek, the guard loves the prequels and knows everything about Natalie Portman. Then Molly quotes the scene from New Hope where Obi-Wan says, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” and they get through undetected. Oh, then Noah and Molly do the “I love you,” “I know” bit that Han and Leia do in Empire Strikes Back.

9:23, Page 333: Glenn Beck is a Star Wars nerd. And people wonder why he fascinates me.

9:29, Page 346: After quoting several 18th-century American thinkers (Beck isn’t even bothering with speeches at this point, the omniscient narrator is just telling us what to think), the book summarizes a Samuel Adams quote this way: "Put up or shut up, in other words; go hard or go home. Freedom is the rare exception, he was saying, not the rule, and if you want it you’ve got to do your part to keep it." Oh, now I get it. I’m a Tea Partier now, Beck has convinced me.

9:33, Page 349: I can’t take it anymore. "Way off to the driver’s side, maybe three hundred yards distant, Danny saw what looked like the only man-made thing for miles around. Whatever it was, it wasn’t much." FUCKING TELL US WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE, YOU WRITTEN-BY-COMMITTEE PIECE OF HORSESHIT “THRILLLER!”

9:36, Page 354: "Upon their arrival Kearns had made a bit of small talk with each member of the group, and soon all agreed it was time to do the deal they’d come to do." WHY EVEN INCLUDE THIS LINE? WHAT THE FUCK DOES IT TELL US? DO TERRORISTS WHO ARE ABOUT TO DETONATE A NUCLEAR WEAPON REALLY HAVE “SMALL TALK?”

9:50, Page 372: I’m done critiquing the prose. It’s too exhausting. The character who is clearly supposed to be Beck just told the FBI agent what’s going on: the government is setting it up so it appears the Tea Party launched a nuclear attack on Las Vegas. They bravely kill themselves to detonate the bomb in the middle of the desert. That was mildly thrilling. Even Beck can’t make a nuclear bomb boring.

9:55, Page 378: Noah is captured and tortured—waterboarded—for a page. This lasts about as long as an earlier sequence in which he is nervous about getting on a hammock with Molly. Ah, this ends when his father shows up. I wonder if we’ll get some more speeches?

10:01, Page 383: Yes, more speeches. Like Ayn Rand, Glenn Beck likes his characters to state their philosophy of life every chance they get, then sets up opportunities for them to do so. “The ends do justify the means,” says Big Bad Dad, before revealing himself to be the head of the Trilateral Commission or some shit: "Now, we openly take the reins. Now, we’ll give the people the government they’ve shown themselves to deserve." Some Saturday morning cartoons have more complicated villains.

10:10, Page 388: Noah is now going to be tortured by some electrical current, in a bit stolen completely from Atlas Shrugged. The prose refuses to rise to the climatic occasion: "They’d refashioned his bonds in a manner that would still restrain him, but with less likelihood of causing him to injure himself in the course of the coming ordeal."

10:15, Page 393: Noah quotes some poetry, so his father…lets him live? I don’t even understand what is happening anymore. I think Noah just realized he could pretend to be on his dad’s side and not get tortured anymore. That’s our climax, by the way—our protagonist lies his way out of getting tortured.

10:25, Page 400: We’re in the Epilogue now. Now I know how marathon runners feel on the 26th mile. I just realized that the scene in the Prologue, where a guy who knows stuff gets shot, never comes back into play. The evil conspiracy has taken over even though the nuclear weapon didn’t kill thousands of people like the bad guys planned. Noah is a PR guy for the new totalitarian government of his father—sort of exactly like Winston Smith in 1984. But he gets contacted by a member of the resistance, and we end on a positive note: “The fight starts tomorrow.” Do I smell a sequel? The Overton Door, perhaps?
*
The rest of the book consists of endnotes explaining what parts of what the characters said were factual This includes, interestingly enough, explanations as to why some of the crazier stuff the Glenn Beck character said was wrong. "It is our responsibility to look at everything with a skeptical eye, and also to be aware that many will try to twist reality to serve their own agenda or reinforce their worldview,” Beck says, and few reasonable people would disagree.

The endnotes are by far the best and most interesting part of the book. The Overton Window is not only the worst-titled thriller in history, it’s also probably the most boring. The plot boils down to “Evil powerful people commit an act of terrorism and frame someone for it, allowing them to cease power in the confusion,” which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like the plot of the Star Wars prequels. To hide the thinness of the plot, there’s a bunch of bits casually stolen from better books, endless speeches that quote the Founding Fathers, especially Thomas Paine, and that ridiculous business involving Natalie Portman. Most of the characters are forgettable, but that doesn’t matter since they generally just disappear once no more is required of them by the story. It’s not a formulaic novel, since the formula for political thrillers involves more plot twists and action sequences. I imagine there’s some comparisons to be made between it and Star Wars, at least the Luke-Darth Vader/Noah-Noah’s Dad relationship, but I’m too tired to think about it. There are some political ideas in this book too, but they’re mostly of the bland, “freedom is good” sort, except for a strong anti-gun control stance. Jesus, what an awful book. Why did I read this? Life is short. Only read good books.

Read more!

The Most Worthless Thing On The Internet, Pretentious Northern Band Edition

A while back, I found the most worthless thing on the internet. I thought that what amounted to a dryly written recap of a baseball game that never happened and never could happen would be the most useless thing ever conceived. I was wrong. This is the most useless thing on the internet, courtesy of Spin Magazine and apocalyptic Canadians Arcade Fire.

It's sort of like when bands give away a single or part of an album for free, in the hopes that people will pay money for the whole thing. Many bands do this, for instance, on NPR's "First Listen." Whole albums are available for streaming ahead of their official release date so fans and prospective fans can hear it--then, when the album comes out, the streaming stops and they have to buy it in order to continue to hear the music they've been enjoying. (Or they could just go to YouTube, but that's a discussion for another day.) It seems like a good way to attract media attention, gain good will from your fans, and maybe sell more albums.

That's not what the Arcade Fire did. Instead, they released two 10-second snippets of music that will be on their next album. It sounds okay, although one 10-second sample is just an instrumental, but that's not the point. Presumably they recorded and mastered and mixed both of these songs in their entirety, since recording only ten seconds of music would be insane, so why not just fucking put both songs out there? Do they think this will make people want the new album more? Did they read The Game and decide that being withholding would get them laid? Or does Arcade Fire believe that 20 seconds of music from them is equivalent to a whole song or a whole album by another band?

Maybe they have the right idea though. I'll give it a try--here is a preview of my next blog post:

...the problem with information is...

Wasn't that awesome?

[From Spin]

Read more!

ESPN: Extraordinarily Sucky, Pointless Network

ESPN is a miracle of marketing. When they started, people didn't think there would be enough sports-related content to fill a 24-hour cable channel and now ESPN has four cable channels (not counting ESPN Deportes) and one of the most popular web sites on the internet. The miracle part is that for a massive organization devoted to sports, ESPN does a remarkably shitty job of analyzing and reporting on sports. There's the “east coast bias” that people often complain about—this time of year, it means Red Sox and Yankees all the time—but there's other things I hate about ESPN.com. The column topics that get recycled every time an athlete says something race-related or gets accused of sexual assault. The willful ignorance of statistics and an over-reliance on “the team that wanted it more won” cliches. The refusal to have any discussions about sports that are elevated above the level of talk radio. And finally, the times when they decide to roll out content that is so pointless it's somewhat mystifying.

Look at this. Look at this! This is a detailed recap, down to a play-by-play, of a game that never happened between the all-time great Yankees and the all-time great Red Sox. I realize not everything on the internet needs to be a great and enlightening bit of art (see Cheezburger, I Can Haz?) but holy fuck is this thing worthless. Just think about how ESPN made this thing: first it was conceived after weeks of editorial meetings, then web pages and text were produced, edited, and sent to multiple people for approval. Fan votes on who the best Yankees and Red Sox had to be tabulated, probably by a computer that was double-checked by some poor intern. All for something that could have been created by a slightly autistic statistician with a massive baseball card collection, some time, and a stained bathrobe. So good job, ESPN! Just when I think you've hit rock bottom, you find a way to keep digging.

[Ultimate Rivalry: Red Sox vs Yankees] Read more!

Why Umbrellas Suck

We had a wet weekend here in New York City, with gray clouds hovering spitefully overhead for three days and occasionally spitting sheets of rain down at us. If you had to go out in that weather, you walked as quickly as you could, dodging the puddles pooling at the curbs, gritting your teeth against raindrops that seemed to be coming at you sideways, huddling under your umbrella and feeling, perhaps, like the hero of a Horatio Alger novel who has yet to climb the corporate ladder through hard work and ambition and is therefore still stuck selling newspapers in the cold, wet rain.

Then again, maybe you didn't feel so bad because you had an umbrella with you, keeping the rain off of your head like an ingenious portable roof. Did you know that the umbrella has been in use since ancient times in the Middle East? And that they are sometimes called “gamps” in England, after a Charles Dickens character? You should click the “Random Entry” button on Wikipedia more often! Then you would have found out that umbrellas throughout history have been more often used as status symbols or to protect against the sun's heat than they have been used against rain, the way you are doing right now.

If you're unlucky, a wind will pick up suddenly and you'll discover why your use of the umbrella is historically inaccurate. If yours is a sturdy umbrella, one with a sturdy “double-canopy” design and one that has been tested in wind-tunnel conditions—like this one—you'll have to grip it tightly to keep it from flying away, but nothing too terrible will happen as a result of a sudden gust. But if you're like me and aren't inclined to spend 30 dollars on an umbrella, your cheap drugstore-purchased gamp will pull away from you, the canopy will make that nasty fluttering sound, and then the whole contraption will turn inside-out, and the ribs will get bent out of place so the stupid fucking thing (which is what you call it) will never protect anything from getting wet ever again. You can try to get the umbrella to go back to the way it was, but you'll wind up feeling like the person at the black-and-white opening of an infomercial who is demonstrating the problems with a traditional knife or lawnmower. “Is your umbrella giving you problems?” the voiceover asks you. “Did the wind kill your umbrella yet again?”

There are no statistics on how often this umbrella homicide occurs (although there should be), but it happens a lot. Now that the rains had ended, there are dozens of piles of colored canvas and metal rods that were once umbrellas wedged in the gutters. Most of them were poorly manufactured, but some of them are the fancy umbrellas with the double-canopy designs or the endorsement of Rihanna. Umbrellas are the material embodiment of entropy. The clasp that keeps them tightly wrapped up breaks, then it gets harder to open the umbrella, then the metal ribs get bent, and eventually all umbrellas realize their ultimate destiny and become stupid fucking things one windy day or another. And when that destiny is realized and the unlucky umbrella owner is suddenly shelterless, you can bet that it's the sort of miserable day when the umbrella was needed the most.

Umbrellas break when they're needed, they can be cumbersome to open and close, they sometimes refuse to close altogether (an alternate route to stupid fucking thing status), they ensure that you won't have two hands free when it rains, and on a crowded sidewalk with a lot of umbrella-bearers they'll get in one another's way. Yet a great many people seem to think that they're the best way to shield themselves against the rain and I have no idea why this is. Is it an umbrella-industry conspiracy? Is it really good advertising? Is it a holdover from the days when rich society ladies would use umbrellas as a stylish accessory? Is it a Freudian phallic obsession? Or is it that Rihanna song?

Whatever the reason, I'm—as the kids say these days—over it. No more umbrellas for me. Yet I stayed relatively dry this weekend, and not because I sat inside all day eating donut holes. No, I had to go to the store to get those donut holes and my head stayed miraculously dry, thanks to that newfangled invention, the Jacket With a Hood. Read more!

Why Figure Skating Sucks

As the 2010 Winter Olympics come to an end—most likely never to be mentioned again once the medal winners have finished making their appearances on Good Morning America—it seems like a good time to reflect on all the historic Olympic moments we have witnessed as a nation and as a world. Unfortunately, nothing comes to mind, so instead I'll follow the media's lead and complain about the recent brouhaha that occurred over the Men's Figure Skating Finals.

For those blissfully unaware of what happened: Evan Lysacek, a Canadian, was awarded the Gold Medal by a panel of judges for skating around and jumping on a patch of ice. Evgeni Plushenko (Russian, pronunciation unknown) came away with the Silver and immediately issued a series of snippy remarks to the media in which he insisted he won, implied Lysacek wasn't a man, and railed against figure skating's new scoring system, which he said was “because the United States and Canada don't have anyone who can do a quadruple jump."

Well, fair enough. Making self-serving, vaguely nationalist complaints is an Olympic tradition, like the lighting of the torch or protesting on behalf of the host country's oppressed indigenous peoples. But if Plushenko wanted to garner sympathy, he missed a step by complaining about the scoring system in figure skating because whether it's the old system or the new system or a yet-to-be-created system, the way figure skating competitions are decided is utterly incomprehensible.

The image at the top of this post is a scorecard for Plushenko. It serves to remind us why we don't care about figure skating 45 months out of every 48. Figure skating has a lot to offer us—fancy costumes, beautiful people performing athletic feats, drama, even tears from some of the women. But unless the skaters fall, we have no idea how well or badly they're doing until the announcers inform us. Figure skating isn't football or golf or basketball where the rules may sometimes be complicated but the object is simple: get the ball across the line or into the cup or whatever. It's not boxing, where judges sometimes decide the result but the winner is more or less clear to a casual observer (whoever looks the worst at the end usually lost). It's not even competitive eating, which is objectionable for so many aesthetic and health reasons but at least has rules that can be understood by every sentient being.

No, figure skating is like passing a bill through the United States Senate—a task so clouded with rules and complicated ordinances that only a few insiders really understand how to perform it. Curling is usually the sport that gets made fun of for being difficult for the casual observer to understand, but at least curling has points. At least you know which side is winning when you watch a curling match—or you would know if you weren't so busy making fun of it to look the rules up. Curling would never produce that monstrosity of numbers and acronyms that appears above, and curling doesn't rely on judges to decide its matches.

The reason figure skating's scoring is so complex is that it doesn't seem like an activity that should be competitive. When you play pick-up basketball or go out bowling or curling, you compete against the other team or players naturally, as a matter of course. But when ordinary people go ice skating, they just skate around independent of one another. Making it an official “sport” with winners and losers seems besides the point, like making “funny walking” into a Summer Olympic event.

People like figure skating of course, but I doubt they like it as a competitive sport—most Olympic figure skating fans wouldn't argue over the nuts and bolts of the short and long programs the way baseball geeks obsess over On-Base Percentage and Runs Batted In. They like it for the spectacle, the glamour, and the grace of the skaters, and casual figure skating fans would be just as happy to watch the same high-level skaters perform triple lutzes noncompetitively.

Which is too bad for figure skaters who want to be regarded as fierce competitors on the level of Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, and it's too bad for Evgeni Plushenko in particular, who wants people to care about the difference between a triple and quadruple jump. One of his complaints about the new scoring system was, “Now it's not men's figure skating; now, it's dancing,” which is a weird thing for him to say—for Olympic audiences who can't decipher that scorecard, figure skating might as well be dancing. Read more!

Why the Winter Olympics Suck

When you are forced to wait four years for something, you have the right to expect it to be pretty fucking awesome. If you couldn't have sex for four years--say you were me in high school--you would be really, really, looking forward to having sex with practically any human being on the planet.

The Winter Olympics happen every four years, but just like my first sexual experiences, they're not as good as you imagined they would be, there's a whole lot of confusing stuff going on, and it isn't very much fun to watch on TV. Also, a lot of it happens on a skating rink.

The weirdest thing about the Winter Olympics is that for such a massively televised, supposedly important sporting event, it's remarkably boring to watch. The skiers go down the same hill over and over, the lugers and skeleton-ers (?) shoot down the same icy chute, the speed skaters aren't fun to watch unless they are all on the ice at the same time...it says something about the Winter Games that the most exciting part is women's figure skating, which hardly anyone cares about during non-Olympic years. And let's not even mention the too-boring-to-mention events like curling, the biathalon, and women's ice hockey.

Having weird, boring things on television isn't a big deal—it happens all the time on public access—but the Olympics aren't just boring TV, they're boring TV that take billions of dollars to produce. For instance, there's the cost of importing snow to Vancouver, which only sounds like an unfunny joke. There's the cost of building all of those massive, useless-unless-you're-hosting-the-Olympics sporting complexes and arenas (remember what a problem this turned out to be for Athens?). Then there's the cost of bribing the IOC spending legitimate money to make the city more attractive to the IOC, and the cost of keeping the Games safe from fishing rods, which all adds up to more than 6 billion dollars, including nearly 1 billion for security alone.

That is a lot of money, and unlike professional sports very little of it goes to the athletes, who if they're lucky become famous and get rich off endorsements and if they're unlucky they get seriously injured or die because their sports are dangerous. And none of it goes to the locals, who resent the whole mess.

But why don't we look on the bright side? Well, unlike the 1936, 1968, and 2008 Olympics, these Games aren't helping to support an authoritarian government or the open massacre of civilians. So, hey, that's awesome. And it's unlikely that there will be any more deaths or any more judging corruption scandals. And no doubt the women's figure skating outfits will be dazzling and make a large number of men ask themselves, “How old is she? Does this make me a pedophile?” Although, on second thought, that last item might not be a positive.

The Winter Olympics defy logic. They obviously just exist to counterbalance the Summer Olympics, which may have started as a good, if somewhat naive, idea but turned into another battlefield for the Cold War, which is now over—and that means that the Winter Olympics are the offshoot of a weird undertaking that doesn't have any purpose any more, except to alert the public that speed skating still exists. And, of course, to sell Coca Cola and McDonald's products, which are extremely delicious.

Some people, of course, hate McDonald's, and these people really don't like the Olympics. They do like Rage Against the Machine, however:

Read more!

Why the Grammys Suck

I feel bad criticizing any awards ceremony, because televised awards ceremonies are so clearly bloated, self-congratulatory affairs that mainly exist to allow female celebrities to wear incredibly expensive dresses. The only people who really care about the Oscars, the Emmys, the Golden Globes, et al. are bloggers and critics who get outraged that Forest Gump won too many awards, or Radiohead won too few, or whatever.

The Grammys, however, are a special case. The Grammys are worse than useless—they're actively offensive. If you care about contemporary music, you almost certainly hate the Grammys, and for good reason. Take a look at this year's nominees and winners. There are a shit-ton of them, aren't there? I'll wait while you look through them.

Now, I bet you have some questions about that list--“What the hell?” for example. You might not even have known that Alice in Chains was still in existence, let alone a nominee for Best Hard Rock Performance. You may wonder why there are so many categories, including both “Traditional” and “Contemporary” Folk. You might not understand the difference between the Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year (here's an explanation for that one). You may be unsure what “Traditional Pop Vocal Album” means, although you may have a hunch it means “White.” Finally, you might not understand the difference between an R&B Song and a Pop Song, since Beyonce's “Single Ladies” won awards for being both. (By the way, did you know that it took four people to write that song?)

I don't want to turn this post into a bitchy laundry list of complaints about the individual selections. The Grammys poor taste is legendary, and for me to complain that The Black Eyed Peas are an embarrassingly stupid group that don't deserve to win Best Vocal Pop Album would be pointless. Let's just agree that every Grammy handed out could have gone to at least a dozen more deserving artists, and move on, okay?

But there's something fundamentally wrong with the Grammys' selection process that's worse than any individual poorly picked winner. Every artist who wins big at the Grammys—excluding the dozens of categories, like Best Native American Album, that no one cares about—is also one of the most popular. Do we really need to give awards to “Single Ladies” and The Black Eyed Peas? How is it possible that the best albums of the past year were also the most popular? Do the Grammy voters, whoever they are, basically grade a song on whether it sounds catchy and somewhat familiar, and if that's the case, why can't we replace them with a panel of randomly selected people? And if we did, would the results be any different?

Say what you will about the Oscars—and get ready for Avatar to sweep them this year—but at least some of their selections aren't also the highest-grossing films of the year, and sometimes a nomination or award draws attention to a movie that is better than it is popular. (How many people are going to see An Education now because it has the Academy's seal of approval?) The Grammys, on the other hand, just hand out awards to popular things. If the Oscars were picked the same way the Grammys are, Twilight: New Moon and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen would be Best Picture nominees; if we let Grammy voters elect the President, Glenn Beck would be running the country, with Nickelback as his Vice President. We don't expect much of awards shows, but at the very least they should have good, or at least defensible taste in whatever they're giving out awards for. No one has ever accused the Grammys of that.

But on the other hand, Imogen Heap did wear that Twitter dress, so she's got that going for her.

Grammy nominees. Read more!

Why Razors Suck

Has technology made our lives better or worse? That's quite a big question, one of those questions that earnest young philosophy undergrads discuss when they get hammered. Some technologies, like the airplane or the cock ring, have unquestioningly made our lives better and without any technology at all we'd still be wandering the African savannah looking for food. On the other hand, thanks to technology that savannah is now is danger of being flooded by rising sea levels or blown into oblivion by advanced missiles.

And then there's the technology that is simply inexplicable, neither a giant leap forward or a step down the path leading to our own destruction, but a little hop that gets us nowhere in particular. If you want proof that these technologies exist, just watch TV after 2 a.m. and take a gander at the array of devices that you can use to vaccum your floor or slice tomatoes extremely efficiently. Or you can go to your local chain pharmacy, head towards the razors, and look at all the different ways a man can go about removing hair from his face.

Once upon a time, if a man wanted to shave, he had two options: go to a barber or shave himself. Either way, the device used was a straight razor, basically a blade with a handle attached to it. If there are any pretentious young men out there who've ever tried to shave with a straight razor, you probably didn't try it twice. You end up with a bunch of stubble still on your face and there's so much blood in the sink from your cuts your mom thinks you're suicidal and calls the fire department. Not that I would know.

Then, getting back to our history, someone invented the safety razor, which is pretty much what it sounds like. All of a sudden, you could shave your face (or your legs, if you were a woman or a nontraditional man) without cutting yourself up. Voila. Problem solved.

Then razor technology became, to quote Joe Biden, more fucked than a whore at the Republican Convention.

Razor manufacturers, apparently bored out of their minds, thought: it one blade was good, two would be better. And if two blades are better, three would be the best. And four would be supermega awesome, and five would be the motherfucking shit-king, master of the house, keeper of the inn, boss hog supernova excellent. And somewhere along the way, we got electric razors, then battery-powered razors because you don't always have an outlet when you need to shave. There are now razors that dispense shaving lotion (check out how the on/off switch is a "feature" in that listing), razors that pulsate against your skin , razors that have microchips, and for the ladies, a razor that will literally give you orgasms. Clearly, razors are evolving at an incredibly rapid rate. We can only hope that they will never become self-conscious.

Attention, R&D department heads of major shaving product companies, who I assume are avid readers of this blog: WE DO NOT NEED ANY MORE RAZORS. WE HAVE MORE ALL THE RAZORS ANYONE COULD CONCEIVABLY WANT. Nothing more is required of you. We can get close shave without cutting ourselves and that's really all we want. With the energy required to manufacture and power these devices and their microchips, you are probably hurting the world more than you are helping it. The only people who buy your products are people who aren't sure what their dad wants for Father's Day. Your industry is so stupid The Onion mocked your five-bladed razor before it even existed. If you want to help us, maybe you should turn your attention away from our beards and figure out a way to stop the savannahs from flooding. Read more!

Why Fake Nails Suck

I saw one of the wonders of the world a few weeks ago, when I went in to a bank to deposit a check (my having a check to deposit is a wonder in itself, but never mind that). The teller took my check and began typing in whatever information tellers type in upon receiving a check and that's when I noticed her fingernails: bright red, several inches long, and as fake as a lesbian Russian pop duo. Somehow, she was able to type accurately on a standard keyboard with these grotesqueries attached to her fingers, and I couldn't help staring. It was off-putting and awe-inspiring at the same time, like watching a two-legged cat throw itself towards its water bowl.

People dress in so many bizarre and logic-defying ways that one hardly ever questions the reasons behind another's fashion choices, especially in large cities like New York. You can pass a man wearing a puffy-sleaved pirate shirt and lime green hot pants on the street without thinking anything except, "Wow, what unusually hairless legs he has!" But in the case of the bank teller, I wondered, and I wonder to this day: why was she wearing those nails? Does she think it looks good? DId she have to practice a lot before she could type with them on? What in God's name is the reason behind fake nails?

Twentieth-century humanity has produced many products that are fundamentally impractical; it has also produced products that are hideous to look at. But fake nails are that rare item that is both useless and ugly at the same time. They increase the difficulty of ordinary tasks like dialing a phone or typing and are expensive and time-consuming to put on--you would think that all that hassle would pay off by making the women who wear them much more appealing as potential mates. But fake nails don't make them more attractive, at least not to men. I've had plenty of friends with relatively depraved sexual attitudes, but not once has a man said to me, "You know what really gets my motor running? Two-inch long fingernails that have yellow and magenta stripes on them." Guys are not interested in fingernails. If a certain kind of woman wears tight enough clothes, we won't even notice if her nails start falling off.

After some consideration, I've come up with three reasons to wear fake nails:
1. You are a drag queen.
2. You have a disease that has caused your nails to fall off (in which case maybe cosmetic appearance shouldn't be your number one concern).
3. You want to look more attractive in front of other women.

Men often assume that women dress up to impress us, which is arrogant and blatantly wrong--if a woman wants to impress a man, she can just wear an extremely short skirt and no bra. The real challenge is winning the approval of other women. So I'm assuming that women wear fake nails and get elaborate manicures because other women are impressed by them. Right? Is a a sort of arms race where the woman with the longest nails wins? (If that's the case, my bank teller is definitely ahead of the field.) Do women show their ornate nail patterns off to each other like some men do with their cars? Is it like the old Chinese practice of foot binding, where the woman emphasizes her high caste status by her inability to perform household chores? Is the idea to use these pointy extensions as weapons against competing women?

I don't have enough X chromosomes to answer any of these questions, although I hope the answer to the last one is “yes.” All I know is that if you are a dyed-in-the-wool free marketeer, if you believe that capitalism is a collection of rational traders, if you believe that advances in beneficial technology are driven by consumer demand, if you think that the absolute value of something is whether people buy it--you should visit my bank. Read more!

Why PowerPoint Sucks

Schools have always been terrible places, from the seventeenth-century Puritan schoolhouses where the kids had the Bible beaten into them to the clique-ridden high schools of the 1980s which—if The Breakfast Club is as accurate as I think it is—were inhabited primarily by walking cliches who broke out into dance montages at the slightest provocation. But it's usually believed that schools are improving gradually. Hitting children with rulers is not common practice anymore (except maybe at Catholic schools) and everyone in America has access to public education (which sucks, but it's probably better than nothing).

However, there is something that has been infiltrating schools for the past several years, a teaching tool that is spreading like swine flu, only more damaging. It requires a bunch of money, wastes everyone's time, and might be actually making our children dumber—if the United States fails as a country thanks to the next generation, this practice will be at least partly responsible. I'm speaking, of course, of PowerPoint.

PowerPoint is basically a glorified slideshow. Actually, it's not even “glorified”: it's a computer program that lets you display slides, just like an overhead projector, only more complicated and less useful (you can write on an overhead projector with a marker, for instance). As a technology, it's right up there with the motion-activated paper towel dispenser. Putting a boring or poorly conceived presentation into PowerPoint does not make it better. In fact, it usually makes it worse—everyone has had to endure a meeting where someone stands in front of the room and simply reads from the screen (which the audience can see and read for themselves) in a monotone voice. The best thing that can be said about PowerPoint is that it saves time compared to writing things on a blackboard, unless the computer or projector has a problem, in which case PowerPoint turns into an enormous time waster. Essentially, schools are spending money on equipment and software in order to teach kids how to give boring presentations littered with clip art, graphs and bullet points, always more bullet points.

I had to “learn” PowerPoint in a tenth-grade Health class so I could give a presentation about calories or some other such bullshit. I put “learn” in quotation marks because if you're even remotely computer-literate, PowerPoint is incredibly easy to figure out. It's not some complex machine that takes years to master, or something that will help students later in life, for that matter.* But the bureaucrats on whatever sub-sub-committee decides what schoolchildren will be learning are computer illiterate and stuck in jobs where they have to deal with PowerPoint, so they figure that PowerPoint is both a difficult skill and a necessary one. (That's one theory for why PowerPoint is on the curriculum. Another idea is that these people simply hate children.)

Educators have gotten more forward-thinking in the teaching of PowerPoint, however. My little sister had to learn PowerPoint in middle school, and by this point, some poor kindergarteners are huddled in front of a monitor making a PowerPoint book report on If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

But hey, classes have always been boring, and we've always taught our children worthless skills (like calculus), right? PowerPoint would be fine if it was merely boring, but it's actively destroying the brains of children.

For instance, instead of writing a report using traditional methods (just writing one, on paper), students might now be expected to make a PowerPoint presentation. They don't have to think about connecting their ideas using transitions and paragraphs, since they can lean on bullet points. They spend time looking for interesting images instead of choosing correct words. They fuck around for hours with fonts and layouts and use unnecessary “wipes” between slides like George Lucas. Then a bunch of class time is wasted by everyone presenting these slideshows individually while their classmates stare at the clock and have depraved sexual fantasies about one another.

And I've never had a teacher who bothered to teach how to make presentations interesting, a skill that has nothing to do with technology. Talking in front of groups of people is a useful skill, but more often than not students just learn how to read from a screen, and teachers won't bother to correct this behavior. The boring student presenters of today are the terminally boring adult presenters of tomorrow.

Recently there's been some positive signs of rebellion against PowerPoint. A Dean at Southern Methodist University is trying to eliminate technology, especially PowerPoint, from his classrooms because, big surprise, everyone hates having computers in classrooms. Older professors have to learn useless bullshit like how to hook up a computer to a projector and students get bored to the point of insanity watching slide after slide go by. The linked article references a recent survey of students that found "The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions," things that are squashed when teachers use PowerPoint.

This guy, who wrote a book on PowerPoint and who looks like an asshole, says that boring presentations aren't PowerPoint's fault, but the fault of boring presenters. Well, duh. Homicides aren't the fault of handguns either, but handguns certainly don't help, and we don't allow handguns in our schools. That should go double for PowerPoint.


*Actually, learning to use and put up with PowerPoint might actually be useful, but that's only because businesses and institutions have stupidly adopted it as the main mode of discourse. For instance, the Pentagon has switched over to PowerPoint and has started making (more) faulty decisions as a result. It's possible that PowerPoint is responsible for the Iraq War. That's how much it sucks. Read more!

Why The Penny Sucks

Most Conservatives claim that government is wasteful and inherently inefficient if not downright evil and while you can quibble with them on minor points--do Republican legislators seek to make it inefficient on purpose sometimes?--it's hard to argue with their main thesis.

If you want proof that the US Government couldn't find water if you threw it into an ocean, look no further than the penny, which might be the dumbest piece of currency in the world today.

Oh sure, the penny used to be useful. A hundred years ago you could get candy for a penny, or a piece of fruit, or probably a blowjob, if you looked hard enough. If you found a penny on the ground, you would definitely picks it up--especially if you wanted some candy or a blowjob.

Now? You'd leave that penny in the gutter. Not worth it, you'd say to yourself--and you'd be right. Too bad the US Treasury isn't as smart as you are.

See, it costs $134 million to make $80 million pennies. So the government is losing money every time they make a penny, yet they still make them. And it's not like we need pennies to make our economy run either--in fact, businesses don't like pennies either, since they lose money by paying their employees to count pennies and dig them out of the register. That's right, pennies are so worthless that they cost both businesses and the government money. They are so worthless I throw them on the ground rather than have them clutter up my pockets. The only pennies worth any money are the ones minted before 1982, which contain nearly two cents of copper, so you could potentially melt them down and sell the metal at a profit (or you could, if it wasn't illegal).

And we know that pennies are worse than worthless. We've known for years. William Safire wrote an op-ed against pennies four years ago, and Stephen Dubner of the book and blog Freakonomics has been an ardent penny-hater for years. Even the environmentalists have gotten in on the anti-penny act lately, and if tree-huggers are in agreement with William fucking Safire, you'd think we could all agree to put the penny out of its misery like Australia and . Right?

Ha ha! That would require politicians to take a stance on an issue. Even worse, they'd have to explain the issue to their constituents, who probably haven't heard much about the penny "debate." I use quotation marks because there is really nothing to debate here. The only arguments for the penny come from people who don't understand how rounding works, those who don't want to get rid of anything with Abraham Lincoln's face on it (he's still got the five-dollar bill guys, and he was probably gay anyway), and the zinc lobby.

The zinc lobby? Yes, since pennies are made of zinc, the zinc industry has an interest in continued penny production. The zinc lobby is apparently very powerful. That's not a joke, they control much more than we think. But even if we stopped making pennies, zinc would still be in demand thanks to China.

Anyway, America will probably keep making pennies until the Rapture comes and the only people "left behind" are rationalistic secularists who will legalize drugs, make public transportation more efficient, raise taxes on the wealthy and create universal health care before dying in a horrible worldwide firestorm. We're stuck with pennies because Americans hate and fear change of any kind even when it would almost unquestionably make their lives a little bit better, and no politician is going to stick his neck out when he doesn't have to. (Well, Representative Jim Kolbe of Arizona has opposed the penny for years, but that's probably because Arizona has a lot of copper mines and the copper industry would benefit if the nickel became our smallest coin.)

And it really does suck that we're stuck with pennies. Because if we can't get behind such an obvious, non-partisan reform movement, how the fuck are we ever going to change our health care system? Read more!

Why Motion-Activated Paper Towel Dispenser Suck

I first saw the device on the left two years ago, when I was interning for a newspaper. I remember watching my boss wave his hand uselessly back and forth in front of it and cursing. "Goddam thing!" he said. "It never gives you enough paper. I'm trying to dry my hands. Cheadle, why won't it let me dry my hands? This is America, isn't it!"

"I don't know sir," I said, because that's the kind of thing you say when you're an intern. "Yes sir, this is America, last time I checked."

"If this is America, why the hell can't I get enough paper towel?"

Good question.

The way motion-activated paper towel dispensers work, for those of you who are lucky enough not to have encountered them, is you wave your hand in front of a red light and either a paper towel comes out or nothing happens at all. These machines have become increasingly popular, so presumably this system is considered more efficient than using "hand crank" towel dispensers, which practically guarantee that you get enough paper towel.

These machines wouldn't be so frustrating if they filled some need--if we were having trouble with our old-fashioned paper towel dispensers, if there was a public outcry against having to turn a crank after washing our hands. But there wasn't. There is no reason for this thing to exist. It costs money to replace the old machines, it costs money to make sure the dispenser has electricity, it costs money to repair them when they break (I assume they break more often than regular dispensers). This guy says they aren't even ergonomic.

So I scoured the internet, searching for a reason these things continued to squat uselessly on our shared bathroom walls. I found this. It says that with the hand crank model "forces the customer to touch the crank with wet or dirty hands." And we wouldn't want that. After all, paper towel dispenser hand cranks are notorious cesspools of germs. What could be more disgusting than a hand crank that has been touched by another human being that has just washed their hands? You might as well shoot yourself in the head before using a hand crank paper towel dispenser.

I strongly suspect that the above link is actually a plant by the motion-activated paper towel dispenser lobby, which is more powerful than we realize. Why? The last line: "When a customer waves a hand beneath the dispenser, it ejects the perfect sized paper towel" (italics mine) . No one who has used these contraptions would say such a thing. The paper towel is too small, unless you have a genetic abnormality that makes your hands unusually tiny, like this woman I saw on the subway one time. Tell my old boss that the paper towel is the "perfect size" and he'll wring your neck with hands are still wet from the bathroom.

But there's some good news I came across while combing the internet for this entry: you can buy your very own motion-activated paper towel dispenser! Yes, you can have the thrill of waving your hand under a red light without having to go to a public restroom! How much for the latest golden egg the magic goose of Modern Technology has laid? Why, only 250 dollars, or 300 if you want the infinitely more sleek stainless steel model.

This is America, all right. Read more!